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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2015
do."There was a follow-up question: Why
had there previously been no quakes in
Kansas---and now for a year and a half
there have been so many?
As the question was asked, a couple
of men wandered into the back of the
room, where trays of beer and soda were
set up. Holland called out, "Well, Justin,
what do you think of that question?"
The U.S.G.S.'s Justin Rubinstein, one
of the three organizers of the conference,
said, "Um, well, if you map the fluid-
injection records and the earthquake rec-
ords---there you go." There was a pause.
"I didn't even know this meeting was
happening---I thought it was cancelled.
I just came down here to get a drink."
Holland said, "Well, you heard it from
him, not me." Soon afterward, he con-
cluded, "I think I'm done sitting here in
front of you all. Let's relax and continue
talking over beers." Holland had been
clear about the connections between dis-
posal wells and earthquakes, and during
the socializing a researcher from Prince-
ton observed that Holland's position
seemed to have shifted from that repre-
sented in O.G.S. statements. "Let me
think how I can answer that while there's
a reporter standing right there," Holland
said, lightly. "The O.G.S. is a nonaca-
demic department of a state university
that, like many state universities, doesn't
get that much funding from the state."
The O.G.S. is part of O.U.'s Mewbourne
College of Earth and Energy, which also
includes the ConocoPhillips School of
Geology and Geophysics. About seven-
teen per cent of O.U.'s budget comes from
the state. "I prepare twenty pages for those
statements and what comes out is one
page.Those are not necessarily my words."
The first oil discovered in Oklahoma
was found accidentally, in 1859, in
a well drilled to find salt, near present-day
Salina; the oil was sold as fuel for lamps.
As related in "Oklahoma Oil: Past, Pres-
ent, and Future," by Dan Boyd, the next
find came in 1889, near Chelsea, where
a well produced half a barrel of oil per
day; it was used to treat cattle for ticks.
Then, in 1897, a well drilled near Bar-
tlesville became a major oil producer, and
many others followed. Within ten years,
Oklahoma was producing more oil than
anywhere else in the world. Not coinci-
dentally, in 1907, Oklahoma went from
being a territory to being the forty-sixth
state. The state constitution includes a
legal definition of kerosene.
I was brought up in Norman, where
my father was a professor of meteorol-
ogy in the college of geosciences at O.U.
Although I had a happy childhood in
Oklahoma, I grew up thinking of the
state as an unlucky one, not so much be-
cause of, say, the Dust Bowl, but because
of what I saw around me. One neighbor
went bankrupt; another, a Mormon fam-
ily of thirteen, had to move out of their
barely furnished Tudor-style home and
into a small trailer; another neighbor had
a series of brain surgeries to help with
damage from an infancy with an alco-
holic parent who shook her. We had
moved to Oklahoma shortly after the
millions of dollars made following the
1979 oil crisis had begun to evaporate.
In elementary school, I knew what "fore-
closure" meant. When many local banks
closed down after the savings-and-loan
scandal, I had a sweatshirt, popular at the
time, that had within the outlines of the
state the words "I Bank at F.D.I.C."
Because I was a kid, the landscape
of economic and moral reversals around
me seemed like hailstorms or flash
floods, which, although both my par-
ents worked in weather-related jobs, I
thought of as messages from the capri-
cious but still venerable guy above.
When I first began reading about the
earthquakes in Oklahoma, even as I
read that they might be linked to the
oil and gas industry, the exact words
that came to my mind were the hand-
ily ambiguous "That's natural."
Oklahoma is an oil state. Which is
not to say that it is a wealthy state.
Twenty-four per cent of Oklahoman
children live in poverty. It is ranked for-
ty-sixth in over-all health, a measure-
ment that considers such factors as ac-
cess to medical care and the a ordability
of that care. In 2013, a boom oil year, it
was among the states that spent the least
per student, and ranked No. 1 in cutting
funding to education.
Oil has brought money to the state,
but mostly to a few individuals.The state
budget in Oklahoma in 2014 was seven
billion dollars; the net worth that year of
Harold Hamm, the thirteenth child of a
sharecropper from Enid, who heads the
oil company Continental Resources, was
twice that.
A statistic from the Oklahoma En-
ergy Resources Board that is often cited
by politicians is that one in every five jobs
in Oklahoma is directly or indirectly re-
lated to the oil and gas industry. ("Di-
rectly" accounts for only five per cent of
the jobs.) But by psychological account-
ing oil and gas can seem like the whole
world. The names of the oil and gas bar-
ons---Boone Pickens, Lloyd Noble, Sar-
keys J. Sarkeys---are the names of nearly
everything: the concert hall, the diabetes
center, the aquarium, the football sta-
dium.These "wildcatters" often have com-
pelling rags-to-riches stories, and their
eccentricities make for a kind of local
Kardashian show. When Harold Hamm
and his wife, a former executive of his
company, were divorcing, the local press
reported on a handwritten, nine-hun-
dred-and-seventy-five-million-dollar
check he wrote her. A man I know was
with his daughter, shopping for a prom
dress, when they ran into David Cher-
nicky, the beloved head of the energy
company New Dominion---"What a
sweetheart he is!" the O.G.S. secretary
said to me, apropos of almost nothing---
and Chernicky insisted on paying for the
dress and the shoes; he wouldn't take no
for an answer.
New Dominion's main field o ce is
in Prague, and many residents are reluc-
tant to speak about the damage caused
by the earthquakes there. A local, who
didn't want to be named, told me, "I know
it sounds crazy, but I know people whose
homes were levelled, and they won't say
anything."
For decades, Prague has celebrated
the Kolache Festival each spring, com-
memorating the town's Czech heritage.
It's now preceded by the New Domin-
ion Dayz, a sponsored fair that raises
money for scholarships for graduating
high-school seniors.
In state government, oil money is
both invisible and pervasive. In 2013,
Mary Fallin, the governor, combined the
positions of Secretary of Energy and Sec-
retary of the Environment. Michael
Teague, whom she appointed to the po-
sition, when asked by the local NPR re-
porter Joe Wertz whether he believed in
climate change, responded that he be-
lieved that the climate changed every day.
Of the earthquakes,Teague has said that
we need to learn more. Fallin's first sub-
stantive response came in 2014, when